Last year, comic book creator Joe Glass successfully crowdfunded a hardcopy of his LGBTQ comic book series, The Pride, a series following a team of queer superheroes including FabMan, Muscle Mary, and The Bear as they face off against villains like Basher and The Reverend. But when Glass recently sought to get his comic sold in Israel, only one store accepted; that was the bad news. The good news? They sold out in just one day.

Glass created the comic because, as a comic book fan during his teenage years, he sound LGBTQ characters were infrequent and obscure. He appreciated the diversity metaphor of The X-Men, but wanted a comic with overtly queer characters, not just queer subtext. So he created The Pride‘s and based its characters on people from his own life, trying to create heroes that embraced LGBTQ stereotypes while showing the complexity and humanity behind them.

For example, Fab Man in his pink tights and rainbow cape, is definitely flamboyant, but he’s also a catalyst for good and a strong (albeit flawed) leader. The comic also tries to embrace as much of the LGBTQ acronym as possible, but, as Glass stated in his crowdfunding campaign:

Ultimately, The Pride is just one series/story and it cannot possibly hope to cover everything. After all, the LGBTQ+ spectrum is infinitely diverse, and no ones experiences are exactly the same.

However, we have tried our best to include a vast chunk that doesn’t get as much representation in mainstream comics. As such, the team includes gay characters, bi characters, characters who prefer to define as queer rather than be limited by any particular ‘box’, trans characters, pansexual characters, a straight character with a queer parent, and more.

The Pride has also incorporated several queer comic book artists to help vary the comics’ style and expose fans to more LGBTQ artists’ work. If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out The Pride and its back issues.